Laplace prior for sparse images Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-18
Independent centered Laplace distributions for pixel intensities give the prior distribution
This prior favors small intensities through its sharp peak at zero, while its tails permit isolated appreciable pixels. Its negative log density is an L1 norm penalty, so with a Gaussian likelihood a maximum a posteriori estimate minimizes a sum of squared residuals plus that penalty. A draw from this continuous prior has no exactly zero coordinate with positive probability; sparsity of a maximizing estimate and concentration of prior mass near zero are different statements. The product prior also does not encode spatial contiguity. Inverse transform sampling produces each coordinate from an independent uniform distribution by for and otherwise, ignoring the probability-zero endpoints.
Put and . The rank of a matrix assumption makes invertible, and is the orthogonal projection matrix onto the column space of the design matrix. The Gaussian likelihood has log-likelihood
Minimizing the squared Euclidean norm gives the ordinary least squares normal equations . Maximizing over then gives the maximum-likelihood estimators
The divisor for the maximum-likelihood estimator of the variance is , whereas the unbiased residual variance estimate is . The exceptional event has probability zero under the Gaussian linear model with ; on that event the likelihood is unbounded as .
For the joint sampling distribution, write and . Their cross-covariance matrix vanishes because . These two vectors are jointly multivariate normal, so they are independent random variables. The residual orthogonal projection has rank , hence the standard chi-squared distribution result gives
Thus these two displayed marginal laws, with their independence, specify the full joint distribution.
The quadratic form
has a chi-squared distribution with degrees of freedom and is independent of . Their ratio therefore supplies the exact F-distribution pivot
If is the quantile of that F-distribution, inversion gives the normal linear-model confidence ellipsoid
For every and every , the probability that this confidence set contains is exactly . To test the null hypothesis, reject precisely when lies outside this confidence ellipsoid, equivalently when . Under the null hypothesis the rejection probability is exactly , independent of the unknown variance.
For the numerical calculation, the second column of the design matrix sums to zero and its sum of squares is . Direct calculation from the observations gives
Consequently the ordinary least squares estimate, residual sum of squares and unbiased residual variance are
The maximum-likelihood estimator of the variance is instead . At the proposed null value the F-distribution statistic is
Therefore reject the null hypothesis at the 5% level. The relevant critical value has numerator and residual degrees of freedom.
The Gaussian likelihood has log-likelihood, apart from no omitted parameter-dependent terms,
For fixed , maximizing it is ordinary least squares. Differentiating with respect to gives the normal equation . Full column rank makes the quadratic strictly convex, so
At this value, differentiating with respect to gives , so
For positive RSS this is the global likelihood maximum in . RSS is positive almost surely under the model since ; an exactly zero observed RSS instead gives a boundary supremum as .
As a linear image of a multivariate normal vector, the coefficient estimate satisfies
Indeed, , and direct matrix multiplication gives its covariance matrix.
Assume the known covariance matrix is positive definite. The Gaussian likelihood, up to constants, is
Its gradient is . The negative Hessian matrix is positive definite because has full column rank. Thus the unique maximum-likelihood estimator is the generalized least squares estimator
It is unbiased, and multiplication of its linear coefficient matrix by gives
In fact . Equivalently, a whitening transformation premultiplies and by , after which ordinary least squares applies. There is no extra factor when is the complete known covariance; such a factor appears if only a shape matrix is known and .
The measurement model has the Gaussian likelihood
Marginalizing the latent angular momentum gives the normalized posterior distribution
Its posterior mean is
Write , so the data map is . The Gaussian likelihood and prior distribution give
Completing the square, or using Gaussian conjugacy for a normal linear model, identifies a multivariate normal distribution with precision matrix . Since , its posterior mean and covariance matrix are
The parameters are
For example, , which checks the square completion.
The orthogonal vectors
are eigenvectors of the covariance matrix. Their respective variances are
They are independent under the posterior distribution, by independence of uncorrelated jointly normal variables. Thus uncertainty is different in the two directions even for positive noise: the data constrain , whereas spans the null space of the data map.
As , the posterior distribution converges to the law of
This is supported on , and its posterior mean is the minimum-norm least-squares solution. The prior distribution still determines the distribution along the unobserved null space; it has not disappeared. This example of a Gaussian posterior in the zero-noise limit distinguishes exact recovery of an observed component from recovery of the whole unknown.
Use the shape-rate convention for the Gamma distribution. Define
The zero null space assumption makes a positive-definite matrix, and is the unique ordinary least squares solution. The Gaussian likelihood contributes , which must be retained because is unknown. Multiplying it by the improper prior and the Gamma distribution gives the normal-gamma posterior with a flat prior:
Here the constant density of the improper prior cancels on normalization. Put
The normal equation makes the residual orthogonal to the range of . The orthogonal decomposition by a closed subspace into that range and its orthogonal complement gives
Integration over by the Gaussian integral, followed by integration over using the Gamma distribution, yields
Thus the posterior distribution is proper, despite the improper prior; here follows from the zero null space assumption.
Completing the square in and collecting the powers of give the two conditional distributions:
Explicitly their probability density functions are
For a joint maximum a posteriori estimate relative to , first fix . The unique maximizing is . The remaining log density is plus a constant. Consequently, if ,
The stated assumptions do not always imply . If , the supremum occurs as but is not attained on ; if , the density is unbounded there. In either case there is no joint maximum a posteriori estimate in the stated parameter space. Calling zero a boundary mode does not make it an admissible positive precision.
If “MAP estimators” instead means separate modes of the marginal distributions, integration gives
Thus the marginal maximum a posteriori estimate of is always , and that of is when , with the same nonattainment at zero when . Joint and marginal maximization are different operations; the usual joint interpretation gives the preceding boxed pair.
The Gaussian likelihood is proportional to
so maximum likelihood estimation is equivalent to ordinary least squares. If and has rank , then is invertible and the normal equations give
If , then and . A least-squares minimizer always exists, but it is not unique: by rank-deficient ordinary least squares, the complete set is
an affine subspace of dimension . Thus there are uncountably infinitely many likelihood maximizers. In the generic full-row-rank case their dimension is .
For the normal linear model, the Gaussian likelihood gives
Maximization over gives the ordinary least squares estimator , and maximization over the variance gives
At this value the quadratic term in is . There are regression coefficients and one variance parameter, so substitution into the Akaike information criterion yields
With unit error variance, the Gaussian likelihood has log-likelihood
Full column rank gives and the least-squares identity
Multiplying the likelihood by and absorbing all terms independent of into gives
Put . The Weighted graph Laplacian of the tree is defined by
Multiplication of the Gaussian likelihood by the prior shows that, conditionally on the precision parameter ,
Completing the square therefore gives
As a function of , the posterior density is
so, in shape-rate notation,
The precision matrix has the sparsity pattern of a tree. A sparse Cholesky decomposition and its triangular solves have cost and storage on this graph, while the gamma update also costs . Hence each systematic-scan Gibbs sampler iteration costs .